Blog / Pros and Cons of the Top 3 Cross-Platform Tools

As the cross platform mobile app development tools are becoming more demanding, the mobile app development company has witnessed a mobile fragmentation which is more significant than the recent wars carry on over the desktop. This situation explains that the cross-platform tools for mobile app development are just not a “one-size-fits-all” solution.

After the long discussion with the experts of the Cross platform developmentIndia, here we are sharing the power and robustness of the few cross platform tools (PhoneGap, Appcelerator and Adobe AIR), and discuss its salient pros and cons.

1. PhoneGap / Apache Cordova

PhoneGap, also known as Apache Cordova, is the most preferred tools by the app developer. The PhoneGap developers are specially utilizing HTML, JavaScript and CSS for developing their mobile applications.

Usually, it installs like a native application, and are able to leverage app store discoverability.

It follows a plugin architecture, which means that access to the native device APIs can be extended in a modular way.

It is open source and free, so there are no licensing costs for it.

Cons of PhoneGap

It does not provide any assurance for sure success.

The plugin architecture performs only when you have the required plugins. It avoids the requirements for specialized native platform skills.

2. Appcelerator:

Appcelerator’s offers a unified JavaScript API, coupled with a native-platform-specific features. The Appcelerator experts need to write JavaScript and utilize a UI abstraction, which results the finest use of the native UI components, and help in comparing UI performance with other hybrid options.

Pros of Appcelerator

The native UI components have ability to offer a winning performance, as well as the Alloy framework performs to normalize the UI across platforms.

With the help of the JavaScript, you can normalize the code across the platforms, and leverage existing skills on multiple target platforms.

It offers value-adds such as a Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS), app analytics and a marketplace for 3rd party components.

Cons of Appcelerator

There is a need of sure efforts to manage the target platform SDKs locally.

Normalizing the UI across platforms, the team will require to guide on a proprietary technology to enhance skills that are not directly transferable outside Titanium.

3. Adobe AIR

Adobe AIR is a cross-operating-system runtime that allow the developers combine HTML, JavaScript, Adobe Flash, Flex technologies, and ActionScript. These are in high demand for the development of the rich Internet applications (RIAs) on a broad range of devices, including desktop computers ,tablets, netbooks, smartphones, and TVs.

Pros of Adobe AIR

It has an impressive reach on a wide platform of desktop and mobile devices.

Mostly Flash/ActionScript developers prefer applying this IDE tooling for these technologies as its success rate is high.

Cons of Adobe AIR

It is not a long term strategy for mobile development. It is combined with the rapid decline of Flash erodes.